And we do have stories of immigrant crimes on TV, but like shark attacks and extreme weather events, we overestimate their frequency because only certain outliers at the edges of the normal distribution get reported.

It's a Friday afternoon in mid-October, one month before his new book about incredibly successful people like Bill Gates and the Beatles and Mozart-the people whom he calls outliers-arrives in bookstores, and Malcolm Gladwell is insisting that, honestly, he doesn't have anything at all in common with his subjects.